Egypt's 'Indiana Jones' at Center of Archaeology Uproar

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The political upheaval in Egypt has thrown Egyptian archaeology
into a state of uncertainty — expeditions have been disrupted and
Zahi Hawass, the head of the country's antiquity council, is now
coming under fire from protesters.

Known for his flamboyant style – including an Indiana Jones-style
fedora – and his boosterism of Egypt's treasures, Hawass is the
face of
Egyptian archaeology. As secretary general of the Supreme
Council of Antiquities (SCA), Hawass is in charge of approving
any archaeological research that goes on in Egypt.

And he's now the central figure in a war of words, with some
archaeologists taking verbal shots at him for what they see as a
corrupt system, and others, in interviews with LiveScience,
defending his character and his actions.

Protesting Hawass

Hawass was given a cabinet minister position shortly before
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak resigned, and the association
has not served him well in the aftermath of the regime change. On
Feb. 14, about 150 archaeology students and workers protested
outside Hawass' office, demanding he resign, according to news
reports.

Some of the protests have centered around Hawass' handling of a
Jan. 28 break-in at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Hawass
originally said that
no artifacts had been stolen during the break-in; later, he
announced that 18 items, including some belonging to
King Tutankhamen, were missing.

But on a Facebook page calling for a protest at the Egyptian
Museum in Cairo at 2 p.m. local time on Feb. 18, demonstrators
also called for an end to "corruption" and "nepotism" in the SCA.

"Archaeologists demanding proper wages, contracts and end of
corruption, end of zahi #Jan25," wrote Cairo archaeologist
Nora Shalaby on Twitter Feb. 14.

Wage protests have occurred around Egypt in the wake of the
successful bid to oust Mubarak. According to a Feb. 14 news
report by the BBC, workers were striking in industries as varied
as health care, banking, public transport and tourism.

Support for Hawass

Condemnation of Hawass is by no means universal. Several
archaeologists contacted by LiveScience were unwilling to comment
on the record about the protests. Those who did, however, praised
Hawass' work.

"Since Zahi is so well known outside of Egypt, he's a good target
for reporters looking for a sensational story," Peter Lacovara,
the curator of Ancient Egyptian, Nubain and Near Eastern Art at
the Carlos Museum at Emory University in Atlanta, told
LiveScience. But that narrative ignores Hawass' contributions to
Egyptian archaeology, Lacovara said.

"No director since Auguste Mariette, who founded the service in
1858, has done more," Lacovara said. "He modernized the ancient,
arbitrary and uninformed bureaucracy that had existed before and
moved the offices from a dusty, remote slum into a modern office
building in central Cairo and one that operated swiftly and
efficiently."

The SCA does keep a tight reign on public information about
Egyptian digs, said Jay VanRensselaer, a Johns Hopkins University
photographer who has served as a dig photographer for
Egyptologist Betsy Bryan since 1996. But VanRensselaer said he
had nothing negative to say about Hawass, whom he called "very
friendly and very kind."

"Zahi has done an incredible amount of good for Egypt and
for the monuments and for raising appreciation in Egypt of
what they have," VanRensselaer told LiveScience.

Future of fieldwork

VanRensselaer was in Luxor, Egypt when the protests began. He
caught a flight to Cairo on Jan. 28 and spent the night in the
crowded Cairo airport, waiting for a flight out of the country.

"Sometime over the night they had
shut off the Internet and cell phones so we didn't know what
was going on," VanRensselaer said. When the phones came back on
the next morning, he called his wife in Maryland – at 3:00 a.m.
Eastern time.

"She said it was the one time a 3:00 a.m. phone call was very
welcome," he said.

The entire Johns Hopkins team evacuated Egypt within a matter of
days after VanRensselaer left. A team of University of
California, Los Angeles archaeologists also left the country.
Foreign researchers with field seasons scheduled for the future
are now watching and waiting.

"We need to see how things settle out," said Stephen Davis, a
professor of religious studies at Yale University who directs two
ongoing digs at early Christian monastic sites in Egypt. Davis'
field season is scheduled to start May 1, he told LiveScience,
but he's "fully prepared" to adjust if his field season is
delayed or cancelled.

VanRensselaer said he has "complete faith" that the new Egyptian
government will continue to allow foreign teams to work in the
country. Yale's Davis isn't sure if the SCA will recover from the
upheaval in time for his spring field season, but he's adopted a
wait-and-see attitude about the possibility.

"I think to try to push for these answers too early is not the
right approach," Davis said. "There's a lot of things happening
that are bigger than my dig right now."